Until about a week ago, if you were a child in my city -- New York -- which sentence would you not see on a test? (Please use a No. 2 pencil and fill in your bubble completely):
O -- The witch petted her rat before ordering Eminem to boil the newts.
O -- The children ate the birthday cake before dancing with the purple dinosaur.

Lavishly paid executives have a new 1 percent number to ponder. It's not about their perch on the top branch of U.S. incomes. It's the lousy 1 percent rise in Citibank's quarterly revenues, which helped prompt the bank's stockholders to reject CEO Vikram Pandit's $15 million pay package. That they were earning a meager 1-cent-a-share quarterly dividend did not improve their mood.

As it turns out, Hilary Rosen was wrong about Ann Romney not working a day in her life. She's plainly working right now, as a strategist for her husband's campaign, not a stay-at-home mom. For all the shock and chagrin about Rosen's comment (which was, of course, poorly put, but was an effort to address the question of whether the Romneys could understand the problems of "people like us," as pollsters usually ask it), it turns out that Mrs. Romney wasn't insulted at all. 

To charge that your opponent does not know what it means to go to work every day can be dangerous to your own political health. I learned this on May 3, 1974, in a Cleveland City Club debate between two Democrats embroiled in a bruising campaign for Ohio's U.S. Senate nomination: the then-appointed senator, Howard Metzenbaum, and his challenger, retired Marine Colonel and U.S. astronaut John Glenn.

Did you know that nearly half of Americans suffer from some form of mental illness at some point during their lives? So says the National Institute of Mental Health, adding that many of the problems are mild and temporary.
Tell me about it! Here are just a few of the mild, temporary mental illnesses observed in the course of a day:

If you haven't heard of the Buffett Rule, you will. It's already emerging as one of the key themes of the presidential race, and if it isn't already known as the Romney Rule, it will be soon.
Conventional wisdom has always held that running class warfare against the rich doesn't work because middle-class Americans actually like (and aspire to be) rich people, and that the worst thing a presidential candidate could do is promise to raise taxes.

Animal rescue once sent me a fabulous mutt. She was usually obedient and heartbreaking in eagerness to please. But I couldn't get her into the basement. I'd go down the stairs waving an entire bag of treats. With a pained look of indecision, she would not follow. During an earlier life, clearly, bad things had happened to her in a cellar.

The most dreadful disasters make us wonder how we would respond were we in the middle of it. That's especially true of those events that slowly evolve from concern to horror. On the Titanic, almost three hours elapsed between the thud of the iceberg and the final plunge into the icy Atlantic. When the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center commenced, its victims had more than an hour of uncertainty before the first tower fell. Both tragedies involved modern engineering feats that were supposed to withstand the worst, lending false confidence to many who were there.